The War of Initiative

Day 913, 15:49 • Published in Australia Australia • by Aeros

Lately, the EDEN Alliance has become stuck in a vicious struggle over the most coveted prize of military combat in eRepublik. That prize is the right of “initiative”. Initiative in simple layman terms is the right of a country to attack another country. It is an awesome power, and can often decide the fate of a war before it even begins. The rules of initiative are fairly simple, and yet they are so very complex. For current sitting Presidents and military commanders, or those who would aspire to command the power of your nation in the future, or those who just want to know what the hell is going on, then this is the article for you.


THE RULES

The simple answer to why the Phoenix Alliance attacked 11 territories a few days ago would be to say that “they wanted to spam battles in the off chance they would win one”. This however, was not the case. Most people have noticed that the United States has declared war on Serbia, with the obvious goal of taking out Phoenixes last major non-native Iron supply region, Liaoning. It is to prevent this from happening that Phoenix launched their massive offensive. Phoenix wanted to prevent this, and so they had to deny the entire EDEN alliance initiative under a few basic rules, the most simple of which I shall enumerate on here.

In order for a country to have the “right of attack” or “initiative”, they must meet two critical criteria.
1. They are not under attack anywhere by another country.
2. The country they wish to attack has not decisively defeated them in the last 24 hours.

The first rule is self explanatory, but I will elaborate anyhow. Australia is at war with Indonesia right now, so we can attack them anytime we wish too. However, if South Africa were to attack Western Australia for whatever reason, we are now “under attack” and thus are put into a defensive mode. This means we cannot attack Indonesia, even though South Africa is doing the attacking. This little maneuver is known as “initiative block” where one country attacks a neighbor to prevent the target country from attacking somewhere else.

The second rule is more convoluted. As long as a country is attacking, it can attack forever provided a different country does not initiative block and the invader borders two enemy regions. So long as an attacking country borders two regions of the target country, they can attack forever because they will always be able to declare an attack on the second province before the battle ends in the first. This is what is known as “initiative lock”. Initiative lock occurs when an invading country can attack forever. The only way for the invaded country escape initiative lock is either for…

1. The invading President forgets to keep attacking.
2. A different country initiative blocks from somewhere else
3. A decisive battle occurs

A decisive battle, more commonly known as an “All or nothing battle”, “kitchen sink battle” or “total clusterf***” is when initiative is decided by the fight due to the fact that the invading country only has one target territory they can strike. For example, South Africa can only attack Western Australia, so that means if they lose the battle, they cannot strike a second Australian territory before the timer runs out, and the defeat is decisive. This makes them lose initiative for 24 hours, during which time Australia can attack South Africa using all our now activated MPP’s (Alliances or “MPP’s” activate when an invader strikes a native territory of a country).

Some clever Presidents are able to force a decisive battle by retreating their nations territory to an invader until only one attack option remains. In the case of an initiative block, they also may choose to retreat the initiative block just before the main effort battle ends, thus allowing them to attack. This maneuver is fraught with peril however, as you can oftentimes have the enemy continue attacking before your own country can mount the counter attack. Generally speaking though, invaders try to deny this option of retreating if they can, via the “double whammy” which is the dual Resistance War and Invasion combo. A president cannot retreat a territory with an active resistance war, and thus cannot escape the initiative block. This maneuver cannot occur in native territory as resistance wars cannot be launched in said territory.


SO WHY DID PHOENIX GO CRAZY

Believe it or not, Phoenix is not trying to commit suicide by attacking everyone from China to Croatia. It was in truth a mass maneuver to block every possible contingency EDEN has for initiative blocking. As things stand, EDEN is initiative blocked Alliance wide until one of the member states is able to escape and counter attack, hopefully with the goal of causing a chain reaction that breaks the Phoenix offensive. Us folks here in Australia should pay careful attention to how the battle for initiative progresses, because we have the power to attack the Indonesians and deny them initiative at any time. Which incidentally, is also why the Indo’s are so keen to launch a coup and overthrow our government. So long as Australia remains independent and hostile to them, they will never retake their Asian Empire.